Thunderbolt Cable Teardown Reveals Electronics and Firmware

[arkmannj]

What is the difference between having three combo TB/USB ports + one mDP port and having three combo TB/mDP ports + one USB port?
In both cases you only have two kinds of ports, could use USB 3 without a dongle or a hub.

Don't be fooled by the current ratio of mDP/TB combo ports to USB ports, this is already shifting with the iMac.

Of course, much more likely is two mDP/TB combo ports and two USB ports (as USB devices will be around in great number for a long time).

Think of it, would you rather have a MBA with one USB3/TB combo port plus one mDP port or one USB3 port plus one mDP/TB combo port?
- One display + one USB device -> both configurations are fine
- One display + Ethernet -> both configurations are fine (though both need a dongle)
- One USB device + Ethernet -> suddenly the USB3/TB solution looks bad (I don't know whether the USB-Ethernet dongle works via a USB hub with the hub still being able to serve other USB devices)
- One USB device + one TB device (external disk, video camera) -> again, the USB3/TB solution needs a hub

how about Apple combine Thunderbolt with all of the ports 🙂 a bit overkill i'm sure, but that would certainly make for a world of options, and just might encourage more device makers.

My future dream (though not practical for the moment) is to have a true universal port that you can use for any of your externally connected stuff. (and perhaps even internally)

 

[hamiltop]

Have no problem with the 49 price point, BUT! come on Apple since when does $49 translate to 49 euros! at todays exchange rate that is almost $71 we all know the cables are not made in the USA so there is no logical reason for changing the $ to € symbol and calling it a day 😡

It only means I will purchase one in the US, and avoid the EuroTax that so many companies feel justified charging.

It's not the companies who charge the EuroTax. It's an actual tax called VAT. VAT is an arm and a leg (around 20% in most countries), but it's generally included in the list price. 20% VAT means that Apple is charging around 40 Euros for the cable before VAT, which ends up being about $55.

 

[Just "Vinnie"]

My future dream (though not practical for the moment) is to have a true universal port that you can use for any of your externally connected stuff. (and perhaps even internally)

Why is this not practical? It's actually one of the reasons TB exists.

 

[benpatient]

It seems like they've engineered a solution to a problem nobody had...

Now there are millions of consumer laptops, and soon to be mac minis, with a port that in truth should have as much widespread usage as your typical fibre channel controller card...

there are too many restrictions on this for it to be a practical consumer product.

it doesn't make any sense to put this on a macbook or imac or mac mini.

I have basically just learned that i spent 50 extra bucks for a port on my mbp that I will never use.

By the time computers are using this kind of interface bandwidth and it's cost effective, this MBP will be a relic.

 

[stylewriter]

iFixit needs a hand model

Yikes... those are some ugly fingers...

 

[benpatient]

It's not the companies who charge the EuroTax. It's an actual tax called VAT. VAT is an arm and a leg (around 20% in most countries), but it's generally included in the list price. 20% VAT means that Apple is charging around 40 Euros for the cable before VAT, which ends up being about $55.

the numbers would be (in germany, anyway):

price without vat: 42 euros.
converted to USD: $61.

so that's a 12 USD difference in price, before the VAT.

12 dollars is over 24% of the price.

So before the VAT, EU customers are paying 25% more to have something shipped from Asia.

I know you said "around 40 euros" and "about $55" but the differences between those numbers and the real numbers add up quickly. Now scale that across an entire country, or a group of countries, and you've got quite big latte.

 

[weckart]

There's also very much the chance that Thunderbolt will end up being a niche technology that will never filter down to consumer level products, only offering these high-end products to choose from for a more advanced market (prosumer, SMBs). Hence why leaving up USB3 at the price of Thunderbolt is regarded as another choice limiting move by Apple.

But that is Apple for you. They are pigheaded when it comes to this stuff.

You forgot inconsistent. All the signs are that Apple increasingly is focusing on the middle to lower end of the market at the expense of professionals, which makes the choice of the high-end TB over the consumer USB 3.0 even more baffling.

 

[powaking]

So let me get this straight this is geared towards professionals but the only way I could see pros use this is for storage devices when paired with video editing YET FCPX isn't really geared towards professionals but towards consumers. 😱

 

[stylewriter]

It seems like they've engineered a solution to a problem nobody had...

Now there are millions of consumer laptops, and soon to be mac minis, with a port that in truth should have as much widespread usage as your typical fibre channel controller card...

there are too many restrictions on this for it to be a practical consumer product.

it doesn't make any sense to put this on a macbook or imac or mac mini.

I have basically just learned that i spent 50 extra bucks for a port on my mbp that I will never use.

By the time computers are using this kind of interface bandwidth and it's cost effective, this MBP will be a relic.

It's a stupid fast general IO port... it's extremely similar to a 8x PCIe port. Thunderbolt and PCIe even use the same protocol. Anything you might want a PCIe card for can be done with Thunderbolt(once people actually make devices for it).

 

[hamiltop]

My big question about thunderbolt is the latency.

While something like this would be bottlenecked by 10gbps in a theoretical TB PCIe box, would it still be able to handle the same number of IOPS?

 

[ZipZap]

A $50 cable? Are they kidding?

Are USB 3 cables expected to be the same price?

 

[soapsuds]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

I think there are two common usage cases for Thunderbolt: pros using high end external drives, and prosumers/consumers who use it to connect their laptop to the next Cinema display, which will act like a docking station with one cable, and could even have USB 3 ports on the back. The second case is what could help getting the technology into the mainstream.

 

[cedartree]

Macmini, thunderbolt AND firewire?

I have a music studio set-up with (right now) a Macbook Pro -- I use the thunderbolt connection to connect to a large external monitor and I use the firewire to connect to some audio equipment (that equipment can only connect through firewire). Once the new Mac mini comes out, I want to use that instead and free up my laptop. So... if there's a thunderbolt on the new Mini, will there also be a firewire as well (just like there's both on my MBP?) Otherwise, not sure I can use the Mini (?) Thanks!

 

[mattraehl]

It seems like they've engineered a solution to a problem nobody had...

Now there are millions of consumer laptops, and soon to be mac minis, with a port that in truth should have as much widespread usage as your typical fibre channel controller card...

there are too many restrictions on this for it to be a practical consumer product.

it doesn't make any sense to put this on a macbook or imac or mac mini.

I have basically just learned that i spent 50 extra bucks for a port on my mbp that I will never use.

By the time computers are using this kind of interface bandwidth and it's cost effective, this MBP will be a relic.

You summed it up pretty well. The most likely use for our Thunderbolt ports is to turn it into "normal" consumer connectivity like USB3 or eSATA. We will basically be paying a premium to downgrade to a lower-bandwidth connection.

 

[-LikesMac-]

About USB3 and Apple....

I think Apple is going to put USB3 in once Ivy Bridge comes out....................................................

 

[Speedy2]

Thunderbolt is so useless.
USB 3.0 is ubiquitous, compatible and much cheaper.
It might be slower, but who cares. It'll be fast enough for 90% of all purposes for the next 5 years, and then we'll have USB 4.0.

When lazy Intel finally builds it into its chipsets next year, the Macs will automatically get it too. The fanboys will rejoice and and no one will ever speak of TB again.

All that talk about optical cables is just a silly distraction that has been going on for DECADES. Remember when everyone thought we needed fibre optics at home for Gigabit Ethernet? Now we have 10GB Ethernet and TB on copper, and it works perfectly. Cables are on their way out anyway, especially for computer peripherals.

 

[Speedy2]

There is also the question of CPU utilization by USB which isn't nice... My machine is quite old but copying a file between 2 USB 3 drives and my core 2 duo MBPro slows to a crawl.

There's something wrong with your computer then. USB transfers don't saturate the CPU in any way.

 

[Speedy2]

That said, this is HUGE for high end pro users. It makes some pro work possible on iMac and laptops that wasn't before.

Yeah right .... like what exactly?
Oh wait... I remember. It's because Apple is too stingy to put a USB 3.0 chip into their products and has never supported eSATA (as crappy as it might be).

But then again, before you can do "work that wasn't before" you still need actual TB products. Good luck finding them and not getting ripped off.

 

[Ashin]

Sounds like the next Firewire.

AKA, flop

 

[toke lahti]

Actually it wouldn't, since the Promise box has been measured capable of sustaining 600MB/s rate in RAID5, 200MB/s over the specified real throughput of the USB3 port.

What is the difference between having three combo TB/USB ports + one mDP port and having three combo TB/mDP ports + one USB port?
In both cases you only have two kinds of ports, could use USB 3 without a dongle or a hub.

Don't be fooled by the current ratio of mDP/TB combo ports to USB ports, this is already shifting with the iMac.

Of course, much more likely is two mDP/TB combo ports and two USB ports (as USB devices will be around in great number for a long time).

Think of it, would you rather have a MBA with one USB3/TB combo port plus one mDP port or one USB3 port plus one mDP/TB combo port?
- One display + one USB device -> both configurations are fine
- One display + Ethernet -> both configurations are fine (though both need a dongle)
- One USB device + Ethernet -> suddenly the USB3/TB solution looks bad (I don't know whether the USB-Ethernet dongle works via a USB hub with the hub still being able to serve other USB devices)
- One USB device + one TB device (external disk, video camera) -> again, the USB3/TB solution needs a hub

Ok,
usb3 isn't as fast as TB with the new Promise box, but for 99,9% of mbp buyers that doesn't matter.
Usb3 is fast enough "for the rest of us" and it's 10x cheaper.
And since if macs would have usb3, almost nobody would need TB and it would be very hard to use it as selling point and that's why Apple might neglect usb3 same way as blu-ray.

Apple is sending very mixed signals about caring their "pro" customers.
Looks like they are dropping pro software little by little and also pro hardware.
Then why should they care about "pro" mbp users?
And at the same time that 0,1% of mbp users that would actually benefit the speed increase of TB over usb3, maybe half of those would also need full bandwidth DP and don't get it.
Oh well, maybe those people have money and will to buy new mac every year and next model will have faster DP in TB as the new displays arrives.

The technical problem in putting DP in LP is that "TB-crippled" DP has only 10 Gbps, which isn't even enough for last gen DP specs, let alone the next one.
This means that once again macs miss a great change for future expandability, which is of course okay for Apple, since people will have to buy new macs sooner and also people don't know that, so they can't blame Apple for it.

About port implementation in MBA:
They could put 2 usb3+TB ports and one mDP.
This would remove the need for dongles for most of the users.
If there is some insane design rule to have only 2 ports, which would be usb3+TB & mDP, you could handle most cases with one TB-hub with some usb3 ports in it.

 

[cube]

Another reason why a dedicated connector that does not cripple DisplayPort is the right solution.

 

[hamiltop]

There's something wrong with your computer then. USB transfers don't saturate the CPU in any way.

I was under the impression that USB traffic is handled by software drivers. I thought that was one of the main differences between USB and firewire. Firewire can handle transfers at the hardware, whereas USB cannot.

To me that's a huge benefit.

Thunderbolt, I presume, is a hardware solution like firewire (since it operates likes PCIe).

 

[toke lahti]

I was under the impression that USB traffic is handled by software drivers.

Yes it is, but usb bandwidth is so small and cpu operations so simple, that you can't choke any modern cpu with usb transfers.
Problems with usb comes when something else chokes your cpu and then usb can't maintain the transfer rate.
Problems with usb3 transfers in OsX could also be caused by bad drivers.

 

[taylortm]

By the way: "Yo dawg, we herd u like computers so we put a computer in your cable that you can plug into your computer, so you can compute while you compute!"

Why you guys hating on this post (currently a -9!!!!)??? That cracked me up! Maybe you guys are all taking this (and yourselves?) way too seriously?

and, yes... I realize that a vague general insult like this will not score me a bunch of +1.

 

[John.B]

Same data rate - but optical will increase the maximum TBolt cable length to 100m from 3m or so. Just in case you want to put your TBolt RAID array in the server room. (Of course, you'll need two optical cables to route back to your desk if you want to daisy chain your monitor.)

IIRC, you could daisy chain from the Mac to the monitor to the RAID array as long as that monitor is Thunderbolt aware.